Alfred Rosenberg joined the Nazis before Adolf Hitler did. He later served as the party’s interim leader. He wrote a virulent, best-selling book about the “Aryan” struggle against Jews.

He formed a Nazi task force, named for himself, that looted European art treasures by the train load. And in July 1941, Hitler put him in charge of territories falling to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

“Rosenberg,” Hitler told him, according to Rosenberg’s diary, “your great hour has come.”

On Tuesday the Nazi theorist’s 425-page, handwritten diary, which vanished after the war, was transferred by federal authorities to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had been searching for it for years.

The diary was seized in the spring by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from a scholar near Buffalo, who apparently obtained it from an aide to the deceased military prosecutor who took it home after the war.

A long-lost diary kept by a top aide to Adolf Hitler, and a key piece of evidence during the Nuremberg trials, was handed over to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Rosenberg was tried as a war criminal and hanged in 1946. He was 53.

Scholars had been eager to see what this longtime Nazi from Hitler’s inner circle had to say in the missing journal. But details of the Nazis’ grand plans for genocide and brutal domination are absent from the pages.

“Rosenberg obsessed a lot about the Jews — just not in his diary,” said Jurgen Matthaus, director of applied research at the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

“He saw no reason to elaborate on fundamental Nazi goals, as he regarded them as self-evident,” Matthaus said at the museum transfer ceremony.

Rosenberg does occasionally raise the issue of Jews. On March 28, 1941, he referred to the opening conference of his brainchild, the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question.

“I regard the conference as a success,” Rosenberg wrote. “It is, after all, for the first time in European history, that ten European nations [were] represented at an anti-Jewish conference with a clear program to remove this race from Europe.

“And now this perception of a historic necessity is backed up by force.”

The area that came under Rosenberg’s control after the invasion of the Soviet Union “was the first to witness the systematic execution of Jewish men, followed within weeks by the murder of women and children,” Matthaus said.

“By the end of 1941, between 500,000 to 800,000 Jews behind the Eastern Front had been annihilated,” he said.

But little of this is mentioned in Rosenberg’s diary, which, for the period from 1941 to 1942, is “riddled with holes,” Matthaus said.

“If you are looking for shattering revelations about the Nazi era, you’re not going to find them,” he said.

“His diary often seems muted, if not silent, on crucial topics and important events, including the persecution of Jews,” Matthaus said.

“There’s a lot of surprising material,” he said, but “this is not the smoking gun. This is not the silver bullet. This is more a piece of a huge puzzle with many pieces that all need to be brought together.”

Penned in black ink, in neat handwriting, the diary covers various power struggles within the party. Matthaus said it’s more of a political diary than a personal one.

Indeed, in one early entry, Rosenberg writes that he has no talent for keeping a diary and plans to stick to summaries, and some entries seem like mere minutes of meetings.

“He’s not a thinker,” Matthaus said. “He’s an ideologue. . . . Pure Nazism, in his mind, is the plan Germany should follow into the future.”

There is little mention of his family, although near the end of the war he laments the destruction of his house in Berlin. He muses on damaged books he has retrieved from his shattered library, including one by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.

Rosenberg was a native of what is today Estonia. His mother was Estonian, and his father was of German ancestry, according to the museum. Although his name seems Jewish, Matthaus said a Nazi investigation found that he was of Baltic-German and Estonian background.

He was a dapper-looking and influential man, but was elbowed aside later in World War II by tougher Nazi henchmen, such as Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann, Matthaus said.

“He gets kind of phased out,” Matthaus said. “You see his disillusionment, his frustration.” At one point, Rosenberg notes that he hasn’t been able to brief Hitler personally in eight months.

But he remained a convinced Nazi until his hanging on Oct. 16, 1946.

The diary, which covers the period from 1936 through 1944, has been digitized, and all 425 pages and a transcript in German are on the museum’s Web site. No English translation is available, the museum said.

The diary was taken by Allied forces in 1945 in preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trials. It wound up in the hands of a German American war crimes prosecutor, Robert M.W. Kempner, who “contrary to law and proper procedure,” took it home with him after the war, the museum said.

Kempner lived in Lansdowne, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and died in 1993. After that, the authorities and the museum followed a long, convoluted legal trail that went from Kempner's home to that of the New York scholar who had the diary in the end.

Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the museum, said Tuesday: “This historical document, from another continent in another century, is now, we think, in its proper home.”

Regarded as the second most important book to come out of Nazi Germany, Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts is a philosophical and political map which outlines the ideological background to the Nazi Party and maps out how that party viewed society, other races, social ordering, religion, art, aesthetics and the structure of the state.

The “Mythus” to which Rosenberg (who was also editor of the Nazi Party newspaper) refers was the concept of blood, which, according to the preface, “unchains the racial world-revolution.”

Rosenberg’s no-hold barred depiction of the history of Christianity earned it the accusation that it was anti-Christian, and that unjustified controversy overshadowed the most interesting sections of the book which deal with the world racial situation and the demand for racially homogenous states as the only method to preserve individual world cultures.

Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg on charges of “waging wars of aggression” even though he had never served in the military, and it is likely that he was hanged purely because of this book.

Upon a mountain, a knight with his servants constructed a proud fortress. All around this fortress gathered settlers seeking protection; houses were built, ramparts and walls erected, trenches dug. A community existed between knights and citizens: individuality and polity [Gemeinwesen].

From the jumble of little houses the cathedral stretches upward toward Heaven. A great artist has designed it. Thousands have hewn the stones, hundreds of thousands have sacrificed things of value for it, and then in this house they performed this prayer: personality and folk-soul.

The sense or recognition of the economic and spiritual community of the whole of a people, [combined with] the acknowledgment of the role of the individual within the community, is today called National-Socialism.
There have been class-struggles as far back in history as we can trace. Many a people has already perished from them. There have been class-struggles even in the German past, and neither will they disappear in the future. The existence of struggle everywhere is no misfortune. But in the consideration of one of life’s phenomena our spiritual attitude matters. If we recognize a folk as a kind of body [etwas Körperhaftes], we will try, not to bolster artificially the natural struggle of a particular part of it, but to give forms to it that more highly cultivate [züchten] and toughen [stählen] each of the parts. If I aim only at the immediate goals of one of the struggling parts, sooner rather than later a sickening of the whole must occur, which weakens the body, indeed can bring about its death.

The age of the machine brought conditions of life that created the soil for a doctrine that with consistent implementation signifies the ruin of entire peoples: Marxism. No peoples, no states, only classes: a worldview that stands far below that of a Zulu, but for the victim of the machine, the industrial laborer, nonetheless signified an idea, even if muddled. The traditionless proletarian, torn from his soil, alienated from nature, entered into world-history. The subjection to a brutal power, which he understandably saw embodied in the entrepreneur – indeed he could not observe the banker standing behind this man — prevented instinct from perceiving that this man was a folk-comrade. It is not the laborer’s fault if he succumbed to the seductive temptations of subversive Jewry! It is the fault of the German intelligentsia!

The Fichtes and Arndts[1] appear to have died out. Intellectual scholars alienated from nature, with blue pencils in their hands, studied the fat books of Marx and his comrades, drew analogies from their foggy verbiage to Kant, Goethe, and Indian philosophy, drew off the stale Jewish spirit into bottles, and made Marxism socially acceptable [gesellschaftsfähig]. Other professors, and not infrequently Lutheran ministers, were masters of the chair[2] and spoke in secret lodges about “humanity,” and about “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Large parts of the German people that must have recognized what was developing [das Wuchshafte] nonetheless let themselves be embittered by the gigantic Marxist propaganda and strengthened their class-identity. Thus was the German folk split asunder. The year 1914 showed however, that in all Germans a spark was still alive that must have slumbered longingly in each one, so as to be able to blaze up into such a holy flame. But the decades had not been without effect. The misleaders of the people, having fallen silent for a short time, soon started in anew, and again the spirit was turned in a direction that finally precipitated the collapse of 9 November 1918. Faith to fight for a good cause was taken from the German and in him was cultivated a faith in slogans and ideas that were nothing but weapons of the trickery of our enemies. Never should the German people forget the names of the men that talked to them, amid the struggle over their destiny, about “international solidarity of the proletariat,” “League of Nations,” “conscience of the world,” etc!
The misfortune came, and bitter disappointment therewith.

Nothing is more unjustified at present than the satisfaction of the German-Nationals[3] that the workers had perceived the stupidity of internationalism and were ultimately halfway “sensible.” These gentlemen should rather beat themselves on the breast and ask themselves what they did to strengthen the national feeling for the German worker! Did they go to him, Did they give him spiritual nourishment, enlightenment, or did they hand him over to outright troublemakers and Jewish deceivers? Have they regarded the worker as a folk-comrade of equal value, or have they not valued him all too often as a human being of the second or third rank? Have they at least within their class itself advocated the worthiness of their folk, or have they not married Jewish bankers’ daughters and contaminated the German people?

The recognition of their guilt in regard to the German folk has dawned upon many individuals among the conservatives, but certainly still not in the “nationalist parties.” They designate themselves even today as “bourgeois” in opposition to the “socialistic,” and the attempts of the German-Nationals to win the workers through a few old master bakers is a hopeless undertaking. As long as German conservatism does not openly and honestly swear a confession of guilt and vigorously take up the struggle against the Jewish and judaized parasitism outside and inside its ranks, and the struggle for German essence and interest in an all-encompassing sense, so long will it attract no manual laborer into its ranks. Like the Social-Democrats, the Conservatives are burdened with a heavy chain of class-tradition. They have forfeited the entitlement to be leaders; they must first win that for themselves.

Therefore a new movement is needed, which treats the whole German folk as an indissoluble unity, which accepts no class-antagonisms within the folk, for which the starting-point and final goal is what pertains to the folk, and which strives for a natural economic order instead of the current parasitic foreign bloodsucking. The unification of all genuinely productive persons of German blood and spirit, whether laborer, student, officer, civil servant, artist, or scholar, the gathering of all strugglers acting without regret for one Great Germany out of all strata of the German people: today that is called National-Socialism.

It will become the proud fortress, around which other Germans can build their houses. That is the way of the future!
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1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814) was an early German idealist philosopher and a founder of German nationalism. He became extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808) he urged the Germans to have national pride, and warned against giving citizenship to Jews. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 – 1860) was a German nationalist author and poet, and extraordinary professor at the University of Greifswald. Arndt became chairman of the history department in 1806 but had to flee to Sweden later that year for writing Geist der Zeit, which urged Germans to rebel against Napoleon. Arndt also agitated for the abolition of serfdom, and was noted for some strong anti-Jewish statements. These are the kinds of scholars that Rosenberg says in 1921 seem to have died out.

2. Stuhlmeister is a Freemasonic title equivalent to worshipful master, designating the president of a lodge.

3. German-Nationals refers to members of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP, a nationalist and monarchist party favored by landowners and industrialists. Eventually, because of inadequate public support for this party of the nationalist rich, the DNVP aligned itself with the NSDAP.

Alfred Rosenberg was arguably the leading ideologist of the Nazi Party. A close ally of AdolfHitler, Rosenberg provided the NaziParty with its anti-Semitic and racial ideologies using what Hitler had written in ‘Mein Kampf’ as the basis for his ideas. While Hitler expounded his own ideas, there is little doubt that he was influenced by some of Rosenberg’s beliefs.

Rosenberg was born into a wealthy Baltic German family on January 12th 1893. He was an academically gifted youngster. Once he had finished his schooling, Rosenberg studied architecture and engineering as specialist subjects in Riga and Moscow. In 1917, he was awarded a Ph.D. The Russian Revolution changed his family’s life. They supported the Whitesand as a result of the success of the Reds, the Rosenberg’s left where they lived in Estonia and moved to Germany in 1918. Rosenberg developed a deep hatred for Communism and all things communist as a result of this experience. Rosenberg also believed that the Jews were in part responsible for the success of the Reds as LeonTrotsky was a Jew. As a result, by the time he reached Munich to start a new life, he hated communism and was also a virulent anti-Semite.

In the aftermath of WorldWarOne, Munich was the centre of the anti-Semitic and anti-communist German Workers Party. Rosenberg joined this party in January 1919 ten months before Hitler did and before it changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party. Rosenberg became one of the first editors of the ‘Völkischer Beobacter’, effectively the Nazi’s newspaper. The position was perfect to allow Rosenberg to publish his beliefs and theories and the newspaper became notorious for its virulent anti-Semitism.

Rosenberg became the temporary leader of the Nazi Party following the imprisonment of Hitler after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler later claimed that this appointment was because he knew that Rosenberg was weak and that he would not make a good party leader and would immediately cede the position to Hitler on his release.

Rosenberg spent the next years involving himself in party beliefs. He specifically concerned himself on the “Jewish Question”. He released a book titled “The Myth of the Twentieth Century”, which sold in great numbers and made Rosenberg wealthy. However, many bought it because they felt they had to – to show their support for the party’s ideologist. But even Hitler believed that it was incomprehensible and full of nonsense.

Rosenberg also knitted together the “Jewish Question” with Communism to create “Jewish-Bolshevism”. To what extent he influenced Hitler over the latter’s hatred of both the Jews and Communism will never be known. Hitler almost certainly had such views before he met Rosenberg but the latter ‘polished’ them. There is little doubt that they discussed and analysed the issue and whatever Hitler did conclude obviously affected his later foreign policy judgements with regards to Nazi Germany and the USSR.

In January 1934, Rosenberg was appointed the Nazi Party’s chief racial theorist. His task was simple – to ‘prove’ the racial theories promulgated by Hitler. Rosenberg had to ‘prove’ Aryan superiority and that the Germans were the ‘Master Race’. He also put the Jews and Blacks at the bottom of his racial ladder. Czechs and Poles were described by Rosenberg as “valueless” and that both should receive “no considerations”. Poles in particular were referred to as “subhuman”. Rosenberg also believed in the purity of blood and believed that Germans who did not marry Germans diluted their blood and weakened the characteristics of being German.

Rosenberg was seen as the intellectual tour de force of NaziGermany and by the start of WorldWarTwo, he influenced Nazi thinking on a wide range of subjects, from music to religion.

As for all senior Nazis, World War Two completely changed the life of Rosenberg. In 1941, he was appointed Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Two men who worked for him – his deputy Alfred Meyer and Georg Leibbrandt – attended the Wannsee Conference. Here the ‘FinalSolution’ was discussed and planned. It seems untenable that neither Meyer nor Leibbrandt told Rosenberg about what was discussed at Wannsee. Rosenberg claimed at the Nuremberg Trials that he knew nothing about the Holocaust – something the judges simply did not believe.

After his capture, Rosenberg was accused of various crimes: crimes against peace, planning and initiating war, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was put on trial in Nuremberg with other captured senior Nazis. While in prison Rosenberg wrote that National Socialism was “the noblest idea to which a German could devote the strength he had been given.”

He was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to be hanged.